The City of Devi: A Novel (38 page)

“I know it’s going to take some adjusting,” Jaz says. “Certainly for me it will. But I think we can work things out, wherever we end up. Once we accept that all our interests lie in this.”

I feel a sense of unreality hearing this from him—the idea of starting life anew, in another place, in such an altered relationship. Could he really have thought much about it? Not just about the grand issues, the ones dealing with body and emotion, but the hundreds of mundane decisions we’d have to make—cooking food, doing laundry, choosing toothpaste? Again, I don’t answer, and the conversation stops there.

The ferry arrives early—saving me from the panic I might have felt if it were even slightly delayed. We needn’t have worried about the two different banks—Sequeira, on the boat, spots us right away. “My favorite married couple! How’s your honeymoon going? You’ve decided to get away?”

“As you seem to have, Uncle.”

“Yes, although it breaks my heart. It’s not so much to escape the bomb, as to escape Bombay.” He’s dressed spiffily in a cream-colored safari suit, together with an ancient pith helmet—the kind an Englishman venturing into the jungle a century ago might wear.

During the short ride to the other side to pick up the “brother” I was looking for, Sequeira tells us about the attack on Bandra—how the Limbus have hijacked a train filled with arms and are using the cache to try to expand north. “I didn’t dare open the club last night, even for the final dance—too dangerous, with all the marauding gangs about. Thankfully, Afsan still came by to make the ferry run as he’d promised.” The explosions we heard were, indeed, at the Indica, though Sequeira isn’t sure whether Limbus or enemy jets engineered the strike. “Rumors have it Bhim’s been killed—can you imagine how long people have waited to hear this? With everyone getting so wild and ugly now, Mumbai’s the last place to be. Before Pakistan can destroy the city, its citizens will.”

But I have stopped listening. Because there stands Karun on the shore towards which we close in. Chest still glistening from the creek, pants wrinkled against his skin, he extends his arms. I know the gesture is not just for me, but the only emotion I can hold on to after even such a short separation is relief. As soon as the landing plank has been lowered, I run across the marshy land to embrace him.

WE STAND WITH
our elbows on the railing of the ferry and watch Bombay ebb. The creek, the sandbar, the fort on the knoll, all blend in, until only a crust of land rises above the waves. Sequeira explains we’ll follow the coastline to Daman, before turning west towards the southernmost tip of the lobster-claw landmass of Gujarat, where our destination of Diu is located. “Have you ever been there? Such a sleepy and peaceful place. So few people, especially after Bombay.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to cut across the sea and go straight there?” Jaz asks. “That way, you’d be less likely to encounter any roving fighter planes.”

Sequeira laughs. “See that green and blue flag Afsan’s raised? It’s to warn the pilots off. Part of the protection package for which I pay the gangsters controlling the coast.”

It’s difficult to think of enemy jets while gliding over the waves. The sea frolics around, spattering us playfully with spray, as if it’s pegged us as weekenders out on a sail. The land in the distance has turned green, the city tones replaced by the coastal lushness of Gorai and Bassein. Nothing ominous flies past above—only seagulls swoop down from the sky.

“This is it,” Karun says, to Jaz or me or both, I can’t say. “The great escape.” I’m learning not to wonder too much to whom exactly his words are directed—Jaz or me. The important thing, I tell myself, is to find the joy in them and celebrate. He leans over the railing and opens his mouth to breathe the breeze in. “I feel so lucky.”

It occurs to me that I’ve never seen him this carefree, this uninhibited. The fact that he’s losing his house and livelihood, the possibility that his city will cease to exist, the unknown nautical and nuclear dangers ahead, not to mention the pitfalls in relationships—none of these dampen his spirit. Has he even given any thought to how he proposes to appease Jaz and me, standing side by side, looking at him in shared amusement? “The wind,” Karun says, his eyes tearing with the force of it. “Can you feel it?”

I do feel it. More than the wind, his unspoken belief that we will work it out, this trinity he has assembled. I look from Jaz to him. Perhaps there is room for optimism. I can’t see it now, can’t imagine how, but given his energy, perhaps it will be okay.

Maybe I can blame it on the wind that Karun keeps drawing our attention to—combined with the sea and the waves and the spray. Or maybe it’s the roar of the boat that drowns out everything else, though I know these are but excuses. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m the real culprit, for letting my vigil down, for letting Karun’s buoyancy so carry me away. It’s true that the arrow of jets doesn’t fly overhead first in a warning pass, that by the time I see the rogue plane it’s already too late. The same plane that’s set to weave its deadly loop in future nightmares—to ensure, no matter how I defend myself, that the guilt remains.

One instant, Karun gestures towards us, to come join him at the railing, together breathe in the fresh and free coastal air. The next, he flies forward, the force of the bullets lifting him off his feet. Somewhere behind me the deck bursts into flame, with Sequeira calling all hands to battle the blaze. Jaz runs across the planks, pulling out a gun, firing uselessly at the sky.

But Karun. I turn him over, unmindful of the explosions rocking the boat, the smell of smoke and burning wood, the rasping drone of the jet as it nonchalantly flies away. He moves his lips but the sounds don’t emerge—the line I love gets smudged and thick. Jaz comes over and rips open his shirt to try to staunch the blood—joining hands and laps, together we cradle him. Karun looks at the two of us and tries to grasp our fingers, he tries to speak or smile or reassure but the effort is beyond him. A bubble of red forms between his lips, and he turns to look at the sky as if the stars are beckoning him.

I lose track of the boat—whether we drift, or head back, or prepare to sink. Perhaps I hear Sequeira shouting, perhaps I even feel the heat from the flames. Jaz and I sit there, with Karun between us, as if we have just put him to sleep with a relay of fairy tales. We hunch over a little so that our shadows combine to block out the sun, to form a protective veil over his face.

My mind is capable of a single task—trying to rewind the reel. The plane recedes into a malignant dot, one I can forever rub off the film. Karun stands once more at the railing, gesturing us to join him. His request seems audacious, but only because it’s so innocent—he’s asking for something, he doesn’t want to be greedy, it’s only if we can accommodate him. Neither Jaz nor I can resist his schoolboy earnestness, the dash of guileless charm mixed in.

He’s awkward at first, holding us stiffly on each arm as we sidle up. The pose is new, he was only half expecting to succeed, he hasn’t quite learnt this language. But then he relaxes and draws us closer—so close that we could all three kiss if we wanted. His arms around our necks, he hugs us closer yet, as if this is a group shot and he wants to make sure he squeezes us entirely into the frame.

This is the still I will carry with me, the image by which I will remember him. His eyes glistening with gratefulness, his smile joyfully lit, as if he can’t believe his luck, the fortune he’s hit. The unsureness that’s always lingered like an underlying shadow replaced by the new radiance of belonging on his face.

The sea spreads out as carefree as before, smoke from the smoldering deck tinges the spray. We rise and fall under the empty sky, borne back towards the land by the frisking waves.

JAZ

18

WHO KNEW THE JAZTER WOULD BE CONDEMNED TO COMPOSE THESE
thoughts? That his story would be led so astray? This, then, is the harsh lesson he must learn. Endings need to be lived, they cannot be ordained.

Afsan manages to steer us into Arnala, a small port just north of Bombay. While Sequeira uses his mafia connections to wrangle another boat, Sarita and I search the brush above the shore for wood. Some of the pieces are too green, others too thick—many of the branches are little more than twigs. I try not to think of what they’re for, try to focus on the task at hand through my shock.

We set up the pyre on the beach itself, well above the tide line. Sarita says she will light it alone, but relents at the last minute, inviting me to assist. Together, we hold a burning branch to the stack on which Karun reposes—it seems to take forever to catch. As the flames leap up, singeing the body I’ve cradled and caressed and loved, I have to hold on to Sarita to be able to watch. She clutches me as well. Neither of us wants to leave before the embers cool, but Sequeira eases us away. He arranges for one of the fishermen to sort through the ashes in our absence and immerse the remains.

Back at sea, my grief gives way to rage. Rage against the enemy, rage against the war, rage against everything that’s conspired to snatch Karun away. How arbitrary, how wasteful and unfair, after the impossible gauntlet of hurdles we overcame. I scour the sky like King Kong, ready to reach up and pluck off Pakistani planes. Bring on your worst, I silently rail—bullets, bombs, nuclear explosions—I’m ready to confront them all.

But the horizon remains untroubled by jets or mushroom clouds. The sky doesn’t rend, no seaquake announced the arrival of the scheduled doomsday. We journey through the night, reaching Diu on the nineteenth around eleven a.m.

The town is in a panic, even though Ahmedabad, the nearest target on the list of eight, lies three hundred kilometers north. People crowd the dock waiting for long-departed boats to convey them to safe havens (where these might be located, nobody can probably pinpoint). Some hunker down in their houses, hoping their bolted doors and shuttered windows will persuade any impending malignancy to move on; others roam the streets with clubs and pellet guns and old muskets, searching, perhaps, for the leader seasoned enough to mobilize them. “Why did you leave Mumbai?” an acquaintance asks upon spotting Sequeira. “Hasn’t the Devi appeared there in person to keep away the bomb?”

Sequeira takes us to his family mansion off Fort Road, where his siblings Vincent, Paul, and Mildred live in a large joint household. He tells them about our recent bereavement, but enthralled by the approaching cataclysm, they barely register our grief. Vincent and his son take turns cranking a hand-generated emergency radio, only to get static no matter where they set the dial. Sarita and I crowd around as well—perhaps the future will distract us from our own mourning. But our attention quickly veers back—nothing can feel as real or compelling as Karun’s loss. The drama of Diu’s survival (or for that matter our own) is like a television show in comparison, one we find only moderately engaging.

The sun emerges as brightly the next morning. The heavens look clean and radiant. Relief washes through the streets and the docks, now that the nineteenth has passed, now that Diu has survived the date without any harm, any nuclear shockwaves. Sequeira’s sister Mildred complains of a smokiness in her throat, a greenish tinge to the air. But by the time the magnificent sunset lights up the seafront, with its golden rays reaching towards the old Portuguese church on the hill like the fingers of God, she agrees it has to be her imagination. The next evening, when the sun makes an even more spectacular exit, with eloquent streaks of orange and red and magenta, she’s ready to proclaim the end of the war. The local Jain community floats little earthenware oil lamps into the sea to give thanks—a ritual that soon encompasses Hindus and Muslims and Christians as well.

Sequeira drags us to the celebration by the water’s edge to cheer us up. I watch as people launch bits of candles on rafts, diyas made of wicks and tin cans. All I can think of, as the points of twinkling gratefulness carpet the bay, is Karun. Could we have remained safe in Bombay, did we lose him for naught? What if he’d survived just one more day?—would that have conducted him past the end of the war?

Mildred interrupts my rumination to tell me about Diu’s charmed existence. Except for a stray air raid on some old office buildings in the center, the town has remained unscathed. Moreover, religious rancor has not been a problem—not like nearby Veraval, with its brutal massacres of Muslims. “Yes, our electricity’s gone, and our lifeblood of trade choked off—we can no longer find flour in the market, and half our workers have wandered away. But show me one place in the world that doesn’t have these problems now. Diu’s escaped the worst of it, thanks to the lord.”

More people turn out the next evening, drawn by the sunset, which now scintillates with an extended palette from yellow to purple. Even I’m amazed by the unusual striations of green, ribbing the sky like a sprawling celestial skeleton. Revelers throng the terraces of the old houses overlooking the harbor to watch the show below, the diya lamps now replaced by triumphant bonfires blazing from victory floats. Something about this escalating drama makes me uneasy. We have yet to receive any news from the outside, even from Ahmedabad (Vincent can still only crank static from his radio). I try to recall what I’ve read about particulates in the atmosphere, about dazzling sunsets after volcano eruptions. But caught up in the town’s festive mood, I decide I’m fretting for no good reason.

The fish start washing up at dawn. By midmorning, the shore is so thick with them that the water no longer flows in waves, sloshing instead against a solid rim of carcasses. Although most of the fish have decomposed or been partially eaten, several still have intact heads, their eyes clear and wide open, as if witness to a sight so shocking it has caused instant death. Given the scarcity of food supplies, some of the townsfolk go up with baskets to salvage the more edible-looking chunks.

The sea soon turns black, putting an end to the foraging. At first, it looks like a vast expanse of shadow, the kind that rolls in under approaching clouds. But the sky is clear, and the shadow turns out to have great density and substance—clumps of ash and filament and debris, as if a giant cremation urn has been emptied into the sea. Larger pieces float in as the tide intensifies—charred lumber and furniture, blackened corpses that joust with the fish for space on the beach, even an enormous banyan, its leafless branches as tarry as its roots, hurled onto shore by the increasingly angry waves. At some point, it starts looking like a tsunami, and residents gather at the fort, abandoning their low-lying houses. But although the sea advances all the way past the waterfront stalls and across Fort Road, it eventually subsides, leaving behind a profusion of listlessly floating objects. A mass one could almost walk across, like ice floes in an Arctic waterway.

Is the debris radioactive? The local government surveyor examines the depth of the char marks and declares it likely. Parents start shrieking at children to get away from the banyan, whose roots have somehow become irresistible playthings to swing from. A woman hysterically tries to vomit up the fish she’s ingested for lunch. A gang of urchins continues sorting through the wreckage for valuables, unmindful of the commotion.

Assuming the soundness of the surveyor’s diagnosis, a city has been hit. The question is which one? The only possibility can be Bombay—none of the other seven places on the list lie on the Arabian Sea. Except it’s October, when the monsoon currents are in the process of reversing. The debris could equally well have floated in from the other direction, down from Pakistan—in which case the city destroyed would be Karachi. Or even some place further, like Muscat, in Oman.

The panic, which bubbled off into euphoria just a few mornings ago, surges back. Nuclear bombs are like potato chips, nobody can stop at just one. Every scenario predicts that a country under attack will launch all its weapons at once to avoid losing them. Does this mean all eight targets on the list have been struck? What about the remaining two hundred or so warheads in the combined possession of India and Pakistan? With even a single missile fired, wouldn’t the two enemies have responded by launching this entire arsenal?

Continuing this line of thought, once such attacks started, wouldn’t other countries be unavoidably drawn in? Could they have set off enough devices to obliterate life on the entire planet?

The true horror of the bodies in the harbor starts sinking in: this just represents a speck of the hundreds of thousands already killed. How many untold more are set to perish?—does Diu have any chance of escape? All eyes turn to the sky, to keep watch for the legendary death clouds. The toxic masses which must now rove the globe like giant dinosaurs, devouring anything that moves in their path. Depending on how many bombs have detonated, the clouds will either dissipate over time or merge together to wipe us all out. Sure enough, the first smudge appears a day later, clotting the air from sea to sky in a sweater-like knit of grey. As some flee and others shutter themselves, the wind intervenes to blow the mass off to the north. A second cloud the next week blusters right into town. But it brings nothing more baneful than rain—perhaps a holdover from the long-expended monsoon.

Reports stream in about towns that have not fared as well—over which lingering palls have triggered ballooning tumors and instant blindness. Babies vomiting blood, cattle driven mad and chewing on their own limbs, well water so toxic it leaks right through people’s throats when they try to drink it. However, no actual refugees fleeing such stricken spots accompany these accounts.

One day, a couple does arrive, announcing they’ve trekked all the way from Ahmedabad. The woman’s face is black and oozing, the man has a stump for his left hand. But they seem in remarkably good spirits. At least two nuclear bombs went off in the air on the nineteenth, they say, describing horrific funnels of death through which bodies melted like wax and fireballs gusted like wind. They’ve walked to Diu to offer a coconut to their family shrine in thanks. They’ll go to Junagadh next to climb to the temple atop the ten-thousand-step hill.

People marvel at their pluck, offer them chappatis and milk. But after their departure, there’s puzzlement about how they could have escaped, drinking tea on their verandah, when everything around them vaporized. Perhaps they’ve embellished things—at the very least, the bombs they saw explode couldn’t have been atomic.

By now, rumors swell unchecked by the day—pouring forth from neighboring villages, alleged radio broadcasts (even some miraculous ones on television), and most prolifically of all, people’s imaginations. Delhi lies in ruins, as does the entire belt of north and northeastern states. The Ganges has evaporated, the Deccan plateau collapsed, the heat has melted the entire Himalayan range. The center of the country has been so mercilessly bombed that seawater now erupts through a hole in the land. Only the southernmost states have been saved, the ones out of Pakistani range. Which means that for the generations to come, darkies will reign.

Vincent tries boosting his radio’s reception with an assortment of improvised antennas. The most successful of these involves a long length of downed power cable strung just so between the papaya trees in the garden. One night, he tunes in to a ham operator warning people to stay away from Delhi, which has been wiped out by at least six warheads. The next day, he chances upon a conversation between two hams in the Delhi suburbs, discussing where one might still be able to buy fresh milk. Over the next few weeks, he collects similar snippets from Calcutta, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Chennai, pointing to contradictory fates. He even believes he “copies” England in the wee hours one morning, but the signal is so weak he can make out little beyond the British accent. Only the sign-off streams in loud and distinct. “Cheerio, old man. G
6
AQR clear.”

COCOONED IN OUR
private loss, Sarita and I remain insulated from the prevailing disquiet. We listen to the Sequeiras argue about the radio broadcasts: despite the frequent claims of destruction, could their rising number imply the country (and by extension, the planet) has been spared? What is the significance of the clouds petering out? How harmful are the growing bouts of diffuse haze? Given that so many had already fled the cities based on the warnings, how high will the death toll rise? Questions that in our benumbed state, seem to pertain to some abstract alternative universe.

I don’t own up to my deception—Sequeira still believes I’m Sarita’s husband, Karun her brother. “Ijaz and Sarita,” he introduces us to everyone. “Getting married against religious norms at a time like this. Truly an inspiring example, a couple whose bravery will lead the way.” He has championed us so passionately to his family (direct descendants of the original Portuguese duke who set up the colony, he claims) that they have embraced us as their own.

Living with them, we must maintain our charade. At night, we sleep on thin mattresses on the floor, easy enough to separate. The little touches of intimacy that come naturally to married couples prove more challenging to simulate. Each time our hands accidentally touch at dinner, I have to remember not to pull away. We rehearse some stories together so that we can occasionally complete each other’s tales. We try to give the impression that we depend on each other to survive these distressing times, that we are true soul mates.

In fact, grief does bind us together. At first, it seems like a competition—who feels more devastated over Karun, who deserves the title of most bereft? But then our individual pools of sorrow merge to form a common lake. We each swim in this lake, see each other bathe in its melancholy chill. Our grieving body of two, though small, offers us community, nevertheless. We silently stare at each other from our mattresses, reliving memories of Karun too personal to share.